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Who

Best known as the man who orchestrated the disgrace of James Frey, Bastone is the founder of the muckraking website The Smoking Gun.

Backstory

The Queens-born Bastone started his career in 1984 as an intern at the Village Voice, where he eventually rose to a staff position and carved out a niche reporting on organized crime and New York's five families. In 1997, fascinated with the documents he was collecting thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, Bastone launched The Smoking Gun from his apartment with his wife—graphic designer Barbara Glauber—and freelance journalist pal Daniel Green. With a collection of lawsuits, judicial orders, and contracts, The Smoking Gun soon developed an avid following (the celebrity mugshots seemed to generate the most enthusiasm) and in 2000 TSG was subsumed by CourtTV. Bastone quit his job at the Voice to focus on the site full-time and recruited Andrew Goldberg as managing editor a year later.

Of note

TSG has been behind some amusing revelations over the years. In one of its first scoops to draw serious notice, in 2000 the site revealed that Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire contestant Rick Rockwell once had a restraining order filed against him. After Ben Affleck had aggressively stumped for Al Gore in the 2000 election, TSG revealed that the actor hadn't even voted in the election. TSG published Arnold Schwarzenegger's account of an orgy in an interview with Oui magazine, and the documents from the lawsuit filed against Bill O'Reilly for sexual harassment. But the site's biggest coup was its exposé on James Frey, author of the largely fabricated memoir A Million Little Pieces. TSG's dismantling of the Frey myth garnered some 75 million visits for the site, and of course led to Frey getting (metaphorically) bitchslapped by Queen Oprah. Interestingly, it all started with a mugshot—or a lack thereof. Although Frey had claimed he'd been arrested numerous times, Smoking Gun editors had trouble finding one. TSG researchers swung into action and a months-long investigation ensued, culminating in a 13,000-word story that systematically reduced Frey's formerly lofty reputation as a writer to a million little pieces.

In print

Bastone's first Smoking Gun book, The Smoking Gun: A Dossier of Secret, Surprising, and Salacious Documents, was published in 2001. The second, The Dog Dialed 911, hit shelves in 2006. As part of the promotional campaign for the latter, Bastone distributed tiny pieces of John Gotti's prison uniform, which the TSG acquired after corresponding with a jailbird at the Illinois penitentiary where Gotti had served time.

Personal

Bastone is still married to Glauber. In addition to her design work for TSG, she runs Heavy Meta, a design studio that's done work for a variety of arts organizations and galleries like the Whitney and Museum of Modern Art. Bastone and Glauber live on West 26th Street.